Guest Post: Is Obamacare The Final Nail In The Coffin Of The Middle Class?

If there were any shreds of hope left that the stunning decline of the middle class could be turned around, Obamacare has absolutely destroyed them. Over the past decade or so, the middle class in the United States has been absolutely eviscerated. The number of working age Americans without a job has increased by 27 million since the year 2000, median household income in the U.S. has fallen for five years in a row, and the poverty numbers in this country are spiraling out of control. And now here comes Obamacare. As you will see below, Obamacare is causing millions of Americans to lose their current health insurance policies, it is causing health insurance premiums to explode to absolutely ridiculous levels, and it is systematically killing jobs even though the employer mandate has been delayed for a while.

All of this is creating a tremendous amount of stress for millions of middle class families that are already stretched extremely thin financially. According to CNN, a survey that was conducted earlier this year found that 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Most of those families simply cannot afford to pay much higher health insurance premiums for new policies that also come with much larger deductibles and significantly increased out-of-pocket costs. Millions of those families will ultimately end up choosing to do without health insurance altogether, and that will create a whole host of new problems. This is a disaster that is so enormous that it is really hard to put into words. If the U.S. health care system was a separate country, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire globe all by itself. And now Obamacare is going to bring the entire U.S. health care system to its knees.

Obamacare: Since October 1st, The Number Of Americans With Health Insurance Has Fallen By Nearly 4 Million

Last week, Barack Obama decided to allow Americans to keep their current health insurance plans for one more year.

Isn't that generous of him? Especially considering the fact that he promised us over and over that if we liked our current health insurance policies that we would be able to keep them permanently.

The funny thing is that Obama is not actually changing the law. So if your health insurance company allows you to stay on your current health insurance plan that does not meet the requirements of Obamacare, it is technically breaking the law.

And if you continue to stay on that current health insurance plan that does not meet the requirements of Obamacare, you are technically breaking the law.

It is just that Obama has promised not to enforce what the law says for one year.

For a president to just blatantly disregard the rule of law is a very dangerous precedent. Do we really want the president to have the power to decide what laws are going to be enforced and what laws are not going to be enforced?

That sounds dangerously close to a dictatorship to me.

And in any event, there are many Americans that are not going to be able to keep their current policies no matter what Obama says. For example, just two hours after Obama announced his plan last week, the state of Washington announced that they would not be allowing insurance companies to extend their old health insurance plans if they don't comply with Obamacare under any circumstances...

State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler has rejected President Obama’s proposal to allow insurance companies to extend health insurance policies for people who have received notices that their policies will be cancelled at the end of the year.

Within two hours of President Obama’s news conference announcing the proposed administrative fix for Americans upset by their policy cancellations, Kreidler issued a statement rejecting the proposal.

“I understand that many people are upset by the notices they have recently received from their health plans and they may not need the new benefits [in the Affordable Care Act] today,” he said. “But I have serious concerns about how President Obama’s proposal would be implemented and more significantly, its potential impact on the overall stability of our health insurance market.”

“I do not believe his proposal is a good deal for the state of Washington,” Kreidler’s statement continued. “We will not be allowing insurance companies to extend their policies.”

How do you think the people of the state of Washington will respond to that?

Things are getting crazy out there, and the number of people that are losing their health insurance policies is absolutely stunning.

According to the Wall Street Journal, so far 106,185 Americans have enrolled in Obamacare since October 1st. Most of those that have successfully enrolled have done so through the state insurance exchanges. So far, only 26,794 Americans have signed up for health insurance using the federally run exchanges on HealthCare.gov.

Meanwhile, during that same time frame, 4.02 million Americans have had their health insurance policies cancelled.

So that means that the number of Americans with health insurance has actually decreased by 3,918,205 since October 1st.

Wasn't Obamacare supposed to result in more Americans being covered?

And according to U.S. Senator Rand Paul, Obama not only knew that this would happen, he actually wrote the regulation that caused this to happen...

"I’m still learning about it. It’s 20,000 pages of regulations. The Bill was 2,000 pages and I didn’t realize this until this week, the whole idea of you losing or getting your insurance cancelled wasn’t in the original Obamacare. It was a regulation WRITTEN BY PRESIDENT OBAMA, three months later. So we had a vote, this is before I got up there. The Republicans had a vote to try to cancel that regulation so you COULDN’T BE CANCELLED, to grandfather everybody in. You know what the vote was? Straight party line. EVERY DEMOCRAT VOTED TO KEEP THE RULE THAT CANCELS YOUR INSURANCE."

So now millions of Americans, including women battling cancer, are losing health insurance plans that they were depending upon.

Thanks Obama?

Obamacare: Skyrocketing Health Insurance Premiums

How much more are you willing to pay for health insurance than you are paying right now?

10 percent?

20 percent?

30 percent?

Well, according to one study health insurance premiums for men are going to go up by an average of 99 percent under Obamacare and health insurance premiums for women are going to go up by an average of 62 percent under Obamacare.

And of course some groups are going to see increases that are much larger than that. For example, it is being projected that health insurance premiums for healthy 30-year-old men will rise by an average of 260 percent.

Ouch.

And there are some families out there that have already been hit with health insurance premium increases that are absolutely jaw-dropping. In a previous article, I included the example of one family down in Texas that has been hit with a 539% rate increase...

Obamacare is named the "Affordable Care Act," after all, and the President promised the rates would be "as low as a phone bill." But I just received a confirmed letter from a friend in Texas showing a 539% rate increase on an existing policy that's been in good standing for years.

As the letter reveals (see below), the cost for this couple's policy under Humana is increasing from $212.10 per month to $1,356.60 per month. This is for a couple in good health whose combined income is less than $70K -- a middle-class family, in other words.

Obamacare: Enormous Deductibles And Huge Out-Of-Pocket Expenses For All

It isn't just health insurance premiums that are going up either. Deductibles are going up too. In fact, just check out what one survey of Americans living in seven different states recently discovered...

Expenses for some policies can reach $6,350 for a single person and $12,700 per family, the most allowed by the health-care law, according to a survey by HealthPocket Inc. of seven states, including California and Ohio. That’s 26 percent higher than the average deductible in the seven states, and a scenario likely repeated across the country, said Kev Coleman, head of research and data at Sunnyvale, California-based HealthPocket.

That same article has a great quote from an elderly New Jersey resident. 82-year-old Larry Saphire thinks that if you have to pay a $5,000 deductible up front, "you might as well not have any insurance at all"...

“If you have to pay $5,000 upfront” when illness hits, “you might as well not have any insurance at all,” said Larry Saphire, 82, of West Orange, New Jersey, who shopped for coverage for his wife and two children, ages 16 and 21. “That’s not insurance.”

On California’s state-run exchange site, the standard low-premium “bronze” plan carries a $5,000 deductible per person, a $60 co-pay to see a doctor and a 30 percent fee, known as coinsurance, on hospital care. In Rhode Island, Blue Cross Blue Shield’s bronze plan has a $5,800 deductible while Missouri’s U.S.-run exchange offers plans by Anthem Blue Cross with the maximum-allowable $6,350 in out-of-pocket costs.

Obamacare: The Quality Of Care Is Going To Go Into The Toilet

A lot of Americans that are signing up for Obamacare are going to be in for a huge shock. Many of the best hospitals and many of the best doctors are not covered by their plans...

Meanwhile, sometime between March and June, the other shoe drops: People who bought exchange policies realize that the restricted networks insurers created to keep the premium costs low cut out the best hospitals and doctors. A newly insured child with cancer cannot get into a top pediatric hospital because her insurance has zero coverage for out-of-network emergency care. Tearful Mom goes on the evening news and says that she thought when they went on Obamacare, that meant they were safe, and why can’t I take my baby to Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, Mr. President?

Can you imagine being a parent in that situation?

In response, some hospitals are already filing suit over this. For instance, check out what is happening over in Seattle...

Seattle Children’s Hospital filed suit against Washington State’s Office of the Insurance Commissioner this week, after Obamacare implementation caused the hospital to be cut from four of the six insurance plans offered by the new Washington Health Benefit Exchange.

And even if you are on Medicare that does not mean that the quality of your care is going to stay the same either. As Reuters just reported, UnitedHealth is dumping "thousands of doctors" from their Medicare Advantage plans for the elderly because of Obamacare...

UnitedHealth Group dropped thousands of doctors from its networks in recent weeks, leaving many elderly patients unsure whether they need to switch plans to continue seeing their doctors, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The insurer said in October that underfunding of Medicare Advantage plans for the elderly could not be fully offset by the company's other healthcare business. The company also reported spending more healthcare premiums on medical claims in the third quarter, due mainly to government cuts to payments for Medicare Advantage services.

In the United States, we already pay much more for health care than everyone else in the world, and we typically have to wait longer to see a doctor than most of the rest of the industrialized world does.

Now Obamacare is going to make all of this even worse, and the quality of the care that we receive is going to go downhill fast.

Obamacare: The Jobs Killer

A while back, Obama unilaterally made the decision to delay the implementation of the employer mandate until 2015.

That was probably a good political decision, because it would have been a huge political issue in the 2014 elections.

But the truth is that we won't have to wait until 2015 for Obamacare to start killing jobs. In fact, according to CNBC it is already happening...

Approximately one-third of business decision-makers at companies with between 40 and 500 employees, say the health-care law has already increased their costs due to hikes in both the cost of insurance and compliance, according to a recent report from political-research firm Public Opinion Strategies. As a result, many business leaders say they are already making personnel decisions based on the Affordable Care Act.

Among franchised businesses, 27 percent report their company has replaced full-time workers with part-time workers and 31 percent have reduced worker hours. Among non-franchised businesses, 12 percent are replacing full-time workers with part-time workers or reducing hours. This is happening now, with more than a year before the mandate goes into effect; and undoubtedly, these numbers will rise as we approach next July's "look back" period for tabulating workers' hours.

It is kind of startling that we are already seeing employers make such big changes even though the employer mandate does not come into effect until 2015. You can find a very long list of some of the employers that have already either eliminated jobs or cut hours because of Obamacare right here.

Remember, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Once we get closer to the deadline things are going to get much, much worse.

At a time when the middle class desperately needs jobs, Obamacare is going to slaughter them.

And even if you are able to keep your current job, that does not mean that your health plan will remain the same. In fact, Forbes is projecting that a staggering 51 percent of all employment-based health insurance plans will be canceled and replaced with new ones.

Overall, Forbes is projecting that an astounding 93 million Americans will eventually lose their current health insurance policies due to Obamacare.

Obamacare: Providing Huge Incentives For Many Americans To Work Less And Make Less Money

Did you know that Obamacare is going to cause millions of Americans to want to keep their incomes under certain levels?

If you make too much money under Obamacare, you will miss out on some absolutely massive health care subsidies. The following is an excerpt from one of my previous articles...

A non-smoking, married couple living in San Francisco, California earning $63,000 a year will have to pay $20,318 a year for a silver plan under Obamacare and $12,647 a year for a bronze plan.

At $63,000, that couple would be making too much money to be eligible for a subsidy, so that couple will have to pay the total cost of whatever plan they choose by themselves.

But if that couple only made $62,000 a year, things would dramatically change.

The plans would still cost the same, but the couple would now be eligible for an Obamacare subsidy of $14,428.

So a silver plan would end up costing them only $5,890, and they would ultimately pay nothing for a bronze plan.

In other words, by reducing their income by $1,000, that couple would save $14,428 if they got a silver plan or they would save $12,647 if they got a bronze plan.

Isn’t that bizarre?

-----

In the end, millions upon millions of middle class families will decide to go without health insurance entirely for one reason or another.

This will work great until they get into an accident or become seriously ill.

As I have discussed previously, approximately 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are related to medical bills. And most of those bankruptcies actually happen to people that are supposedly "covered" by health insurance.

Obamacare is going to make all of this so much worse. Millions of middle class families will end up with no health insurance at all, and because so many of them are living paycheck to paycheck a single health emergency will be enough to send them hurtling down the path to financial oblivion.

If you get into an accident, a visit to the emergency room and a single night in the hospital can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars in many areas of the country.

If you get a serious illness such as cancer, the medical bills can be absolutely astronomical. For instance, there are many cancer patients that rack up medical bills well in excess of a million dollars by the time that they die.

Something desperately needs to be done about our horrible health care system. Unfortunately, Obamacare is going to make just about everything that is bad about our current system much, much worse.

And the American people are becoming increasingly disgusted and frustrated with Obamacare. According to Real Clear Politics, an average of recent opinion polls shows that the American people are opposed to Obamacare by an average margin of 14.2 percentage points.

This bullshit is going to start resulting in a body count. At what point do we do something about this? I guess if we have no cajones, then the body count will just start growing and real darwinism (see also eugenics) takes hold.

Nice job Obama. The buck stops with you - no matter how you or the media spins it. You will be described as an atrocity. The rest of the socialists were just mis-guided, with utopian foolishness and fools to follow it (Carter, Johnson, Roosevelt)--- but not you, you just got busy killin'.

Mr. Collapse is a bit loose in his reasoning. In his own words, "As I have discussed previously, approximately 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are related to medical bills. And most of those bankruptcies actually happen to people that are supposedly "covered" by health insurance."

The cheap insurance policies that people are losing are exactly the insurance policies that leave them in bankruptcy as the author notes. One reason why Obamacare policies are so crazy expensive is they outlaw lifetime coverage limits. You go bankrupt with insurance because in the fine print there are lifetime limits to coverage per diagnosis or per person. If the insurance company finds out that you have a diagnosis guaranteed to exceeed the limit, first they probably try to rescind your policy because you failed to mention your hangnails when you enrolled; and if that doesn't work, they just forget about you. They do nothing to defend you against the hospitals; they just pay whatever bill until you hit the limit, and cancel you. Rapacious American hospitals can burn through your maximum in less than six months, so even though you think you have catastrophic insurance, you actually got nothin. A catastrophic accident or diagnosis will bankrupt you anyhow. It's actually cheaper to live outside the USA, in a country where the cash prices for healthcare are not rapacious, and have no insurance at all.

As the author himself noted, the middle class was being picked off in large numbers by medical bankruptcy prior to Obamacare. The real middle class killer is the greedbags US health system that is designed to take all your money. Though Obamacare itself is an obvious K Street-driven disaster, I had hoped it would at least blow up the existing system. Now it appears that it will blow up on the launchpad.

But please don't be deluded. Here is the before and after:

Before: you have a great deal on catastrophic insurance from the American Eagle Family Insruance Co. of Scamwater Florida, and you can go to Expensive Children's hospital for cancer coverage for four months before hitting your lifetime limit, and then you can't go there anymore because you can't pay anymore.

After: you have an expensive Obamacare-compliant policy with no lifetime limit, so a cancer diagnosis will not bankrupt you. Whatever tin-plated hospital is in your network will take care of you all the way. But Expensive Children's Hospital is no longer in your network.

"The confluence of so many negative co-factors and highly consequential outcomes associated with the implementation of Obamacare has the potential of transforming the USA into an Obamanation — one that is thoroughly broke, busted and disgusted. This observation is not meant in any way to be satirical or humorous. The more one looks at the far-reaching social costs and economically destructive aspects of the ACA, the more it becomes apparent that it MUST be repealed!"

It begins with the whole nature of the Rockefeller designed medical system focused on "drug 'em & cut 'em".That pharma & surgery based system can work well if someone is in a car accident and needs emergency care, but in general it doesn't promote health - but actually kills a quarter million people each year.

All the rest of it, including the newest version with o'care' is about the American fascist model. Low lifes in government & big insider corporations colluding to screw over the public. The insurance industry wrote the o 'care' rip off. The repubs have their own version of the plan for theft. The 'conservative' Heritage Foundation had their rip off model 20 years ago. D vs R, 'lib' vs 'conservative' is b.s. except in dumb voters and campaign volunteers pea brains.

If/when it goes to a complete government system (so those with the same mindset as the post office now dictate your health care) you can bet that insider corpoations will be given fat, juicy government contracts to do functions they used to do before. But they won't have to worry about their bottom line. That will be guaranteed.

I see repeatedly that "something had to be done about our awful health care system" and yet poll after poll revealed that the vast majority of the 85% who had insurance were quite satisfied with their personal coverage and care. This idea that Americans were marching in the street for a health care revolution is ludicrous and a fantasy of those who want to experiment on a population.

After: The entire systems collapses and is replaced with "single payer" and there is no longer care available at ANY price except on the black(aka: free) market without any gov't cartel endorsement/enforcement.

The good new is this: all those who fall from the middle class to lower-paid temporary jobs will be lucky to make $60K, so they will - according to the article - get the subsidy and have free healthcare. Is this great or what?

All we need is for Mr. Yellen to print all the money necessary to fund the subsidies, because I doubt actual taxes will suffice.

Most Americans are ignorant dumbazzes. Too stupid to realize that 'their guy' has the same plan as 'the other guy'

They actually believe 'healthcare' has something to do with this new form of theft and power grab. If the crooks were more open they'd just say "We want X of your dollars and we want to control you & this gives us more leverage on you." Theyre too evil smart for that, so wrap it in lies. Same tactics as when they said TARP was about 'saving the economy from a global meltdown' - total horsesh*t.

And people fall for it. They get bogged down in arguments as to what length rope the executioner will use on them.

The powers that wannabe are purposely confusing two separate but important issues. The "cost" of health care has different meanings depending on your viewpoint. For the average Joe it's the price of insurance plus co-pays. For the DC crowd it's the actual expenses that compose what health care covers. Most folks don't give a flip if a procedure rises in price because of insurance.

The dirty little secret of Obamacare is bursting into the open. The insurance companies were played (well-deserved). The vast majority of the paycheck to paycheck crowd can't afford private insurance even with 100% subsidy due to the mile-high deducibles. Therefore they are going into Medicaid which doctors are refusing to take. So, they have "health care" but will end up in the hospital emergency room like before.

Sen Frist (our former Senator and a heart surgeon) had a great article on CNBC yesterday that Obamacare would not lower costs. The best way to reduce costs is advanced technology and healthy living. Obesity, smoking, too much booze and not enough exercise cause the vast majority of our health problems - heart attacks, diabetes and cancer.

In a weird sense, Obamacare is implementing the policy that many fiscal conservatives wanted: making people pay out of their own pockets. Or, in Obamaspeak, have more skin in the game. With all the increased co-pays and deductibles, people will begin to realize that healthcare actually does cost money and it all can't be simply paid for magically by insurance providers. The whole scheme looks more and more like an unintended step in the direction of catastrophy-only health insurance. This would be good, in my opinion, were it not for all the fascist control freaks running the show from DC. That outweighs any good benefits, I'm afraid.

It wouldn't matter. Our fate was sealed long ago. The Ponzi scheme that is the US eCONomy would have needed the same level of gov't spending to backfill the collapse. So had Obama not been elected? Well... it's not like we scaled back reckless military spending, despite what the naive "liberals" thought their man represented, BUT - McCain would have gone all in. They are both sociopaths. And people should remember that ACA isn't exactly a new train of thought. The Nixon administration trotted out the same program... and sociopath Romney passed the same program in Mass.

The thought that life would be better or our fate would be different if only some other man or some other party would have been elected is part scam.

'socio-path' = a psychopath who orders someone else to pull the trigger for him

Its all the same.These evil individuals just use different means to kill people - - - wars based on lies, theft of peoples lifetime savings and the slow death that brings, or stealing their money and putting them into a 'medical' system that kills at least 250,000 per year and is likely to go much higher now

The outlines for what is now O 'care' were proposed by the so called 'conservative' Heritage Foundation in 1989. There also was romnoid 'care' - the model for commie O 'care'. This society is rotten to the core. The psychopaths use the institutions to impoverish and murder the people.

Now the R branch of the demorepublicraps are arguing the details of what should be completely dumped.

Yes - hammering the lid shut. That´s what is happening right now. Question is - why does the oligarch - Democrat complex hate the middle class that much. In Orwell´s prescient tome it was the same. The middle class was heavily controlled and supervised. The free-shit brigade not so much. The Proles as they are refereed to in the book. The means to keep them in line were alcohol , pornography and lotteries (of course fake lotteries).

In a historical context the middle class have always been the breeding ground for new political ideas and time and time again they have turned political in order to reach influence. It has been a repetitive pattern since Rennessance , even earlier.

That´s why TPTB hate and loathe the middle class as much as they do. Fear.

Even my middle-of-the-road-politically wife is very concerned about what is happening. She is especially concerned about the obvious malfeasance of the Bamster. He knows that the Feds are terrible at IT projects yet is completely unaware that the web site does not work at rollout? He has consistently misrepresented the law and if the tables were turned there would be an army of US Government lawyers with subpoenas getting ready to shut this thing down.

At best the Bamster is guilty of malfeasance, intentional disregard for fulfilling his duties. His actions might even be malicious, which would open up an entirely new can of worms.

Amnesty might be the final nail. Flooding our labor markets with cheap labor and having to pay increased social costs to sustain imported underducated and unskilled foreigners will destroy the middle class.

I think this will become less and less of an issue as automation goes into high gear and the pace of technological advance accelerates. The only jobs will be those that use the mind. All the factory workers, ticket takers, clerks, truck drivers and freight handlers will be out of work and headed to the permanent nanny state side of the ledger where they will trade food stamps, basic health care and entertainment 24/7 for a job.

The premiums are projected to spike unemployment by at least 4 million jobs in 2014. Most layoffs in white collar or "retirements" happen after the 30-day resignation letter is given pre-XMAS. So, I suspect this need to keep the tapering throttle open is this explanation that any first year graduate model in labour economics could easily see rolling down the shit-pipe.

This is going to rubberband into the FIRE economy when all the rosy projections for policy sales are divided by 2, and family plan margins go back to 2003. The next domino to fall will be those luxury drugs that are pumping up the Biotech multiples. How many JoeQ publics are going to be affording Liptor on their 4,000/month salary when insurance is 800/month, rent is 1,900/month and your student loan is 900/month. Now lets pick a 'fresher' drug like Eliquis. Market is projecting this heart drug is going to come out with slick 35% gross margins due to the rise in heart disease. That 35% is based on assuming 5 million in first year drug sales. Take a wild guess how 99% of those fat african americans (because that is who the drug's primary consumers are targeted towards) will be able to afford this new pancrea when the 60% blue shield coverage goes zilch ?

Why would you not help an elderly person in need of help regardless of their political persuasion??? I don't like obama or his potlitics, but be considerate to old folks.....you will be there sooner than you think.

This is a sign of the times. I remember election parties where both sides were present - lots of loud talk, good food and a good time. No more - now ideology is turning us into mean human beings and it's really sad. Reminds me of the Daily Kos writer who slowed down for a woman and child in an overheated car on the side of the road then spied the "Bush" sticker and drove on. Talk about getting priorities screwed up.

Don't forget Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. Those !@#$'s pored millions into that guys campaign in 2008 and 2012 even as W was the one saving their bacon when their Ponzi scheme unraveled. Those guys are the real enemy.

Hmmm...you still do not grasp the meaning of "insurance" in Obamacare. Normally insurance is a tool to distribute risk but it can also be used as a tool for redistribution. Who will be funding Eliquis...why you of course. You and countless other middle-class peons. What did you think?

Bah, another "red scare" article on Obamacare, which misrepresents a lot of facts and fails to mention others (like the nature of those non compliant policies the insurers threatened to revoke). As for premiums, we'll see; AFAIK there are no real numbers yet. I'm so fucking tired of this Obamacare distraction, the red scare bullshit and the "Obama socialist" idiocy being spewed non stop here at ZH for the last couple of weeks. The real results of this all will not be known until a couple months ahead; so all this "be scaaared" crap is pure bullshit. We'll all have to wait and see how this whole mess unfolds... anything before that is just pure (ideological) speculation.

he said he wants single payer system, and apologizes to his supporters that the total process may take 20 years to complete. what is happening is not exaggerations, unfounded smears, or unintended consequences.

BHO is a marxist. and as such, no amount of suffering, by others, will deter carrying out whatever means necessary to reach their goals. and as a facist puppet, no crumb is too small to extract for his corporate masters.

He said so much bullshit during the pre-ACA debate, when in the end he had already taken side with the insurers and drug companies. Single payer was dead-on-arrival. And in fact, most probably if you had a single payer system you'd be doing a lot better. Like the healthcare systems of most of the industrialized countries in the world. But I'm not going to enter that discussion, it's way too offtopic.

Obama is such a Marxist... like when Marx told "print money to give the bankers", or when Marx told "bust unions and impoverish workers". Or that famous other Marx quote about "wage wars for oil companies and corporations", etc... Obama might be a fascist, in fact I think he is. But he is no Marxist.

Maybe you don't know, but the right-left thingie was born from those who sat to the left or to the right of the king. Those on the right supported the divine right of kings and those on the left wanted to limit the power of kings.

Lets remember that socialism and fascism are first cousins born of the same progenitor, i.e., rabid statism. They are not so much right and left extremes, but a line that is bent into a circle where both ends meet at the bottom of the circle in human slavery.

With all due respect there is already 4 independent sell side brokers who have nailed the number on forward insurance sales to have inflated from providers leaving the exchange. Protip: its bigger than +300% cost to the Ico's and personal premiums have went up at least 500%. This fits with channel checks.

Google a drug co investor conference presentation. This has been also verified as forward drug sale guidance has been significantly tapered (there's that word again!) for 2015.

So let me get this straight. An annon. on the internet is going against a bunch of reports he can buy himself and have his company write off as an expense if he is a Series 7 but he himself has no research to back up his bull case. This same annon. is going to argue against channel checks he himself can perform on the website with a quick dummy policy made via filling out some Monnex forms ?

Ok....

Do us a favor. Why don't you go check out the website page, and after cooking up a single, double and single-divorced family policy on a dummy account come back to us with some % policy escalation figures.

I refuse to accept all this baseless fearmongering about a supposed apocallypse in healtchare when not even a month has gone by since the ACA went into effect.

And after all, I couldn't care less. I don't live in the US so this issue doesn't affect me at all. But I can't believe how many people love to be fearful (maybe they were scared the same by "terrorism" during the Bush years) about things that haven't happened yet.

Well, do whatever you want. History has proven you make such good decisions while scared (red scare, terror-scare, now Obamascare).

You're talking about a supposed future. All I'm saying is that we still don't know as this mess ain't as clear as many people here think it is. It may end up worse or not. We'll have to wait some time until THE REAL NUMBERS start showing up. And it's not a thing of blue vs. red; it's red scare as in "commie gonna kill us" red kind of scare.

My monthly nut went from $500 to $600, and I'm the lucky one. My sisters went from $600 to $1200. My sister-in-laws went from $0 tp $2000. She has her leg amputated after some weird infection. She couldn't get insurance, now she can't pay for it. My two brothers were both canceled. They've looked around and it looks like they're gonna be paying double what they were paying.

My cost for insurance that provided more than adequate coverage for a family of 5, including, 3 kids, 16, 5 and 3, went from $400 per month to $800 per month. But, fuck yeah, let's wait and see how it plays out for the masses.

Have you not paid an insurance premium or "healthcare" bills for the past 20 years?

Have they gone down or have they gone up?

Is the "messiah" Obama going to save you or not?

Did he end the wars? NO.

Did he reform Wall Street? NO.

Did he do ANYTHING he promised? NO.

Get a grip, this is not about politics or Red Team/Blue team, it is about MONEY and SURVIVAL and if you don't see that the 99% are getting taken to the GLUE FACTORY you have blinders on and need to eat your oats and a carrot or two.

I pay healthcare bills in my country which go up on inflation. But it's a different system from that in the US. I pay a private insurer, used to pay a co-op system too through salary taxes; and also have a public option for free.

I never expected Obama to be a Messiah. I kinda expected him to be another US president, with all that it means. I knew he would never reform Wall Street, those who funded his campaign. I kinda expected him to slow down on the war apparatus, but guess that's impossible in the US.

I see the 99% are getting screwed, and if you had managed to get single payer or a public option you would have got a chance I guess. But considering not a month has gone since the ACA was enacted, I guess it's way too early to cry "end of the world". It might end up working, it might not.

I just can't take the red-scare, like the commie scare in the 50's about "end of the world" when not even a month has passed. Get a grip y'all, please.

Obama is a controller. He thinks he can control more if he partners with fascists so he speaks and acts as a fascist. When he thinks it will extend or solidify his control to do X, he will invariably make a run at X. So he's whatever will benefit him, though he's never a conservative or a constitutionalist. He's got a team, and it's team 'control'. Liberty and the Constitution don't further the aims of the team, nor do they do anything to enhance Obama's control, so they're useless at best and are treated as such.

The size and scope of the failure dwarfs this website distraction by orders of magnitude.

What Obamascare does is insidiously turn over your health decisions to the federal government central planners, who have already screwed it up to this point.It will get much, much worse, likely quickly.Those on employer plans will lose their coverage as well.

5 years from now, this country will be unrecognizable.It will have all the worst elements of the old Soviet system (long wait times, shortages, bribery for service), with all the worst features of the current configuration (huge mandatory premiums, which will destroy growth further).

Thanks for the link, I was seeking such a metric. My business is very “elastic” and subject to short term fluctuations. We are also a “leading” indicator (staffing), so we tend to see trends before they manifest through the rest of the economy. About Oct 1 we definitely saw a change in activity and right now we would call our business “slow”.

The medical industry, perhaps even more than the financial (dis) services and banking industry has its hooks in Congress. This has resulted in the cartelization of medicine. It now prices services of all kinds in a monopolistic fashion. Obamacare avoids this 800 pound Gorilla in the room and gives us a Frankenstein monster instead. I am amazed that, amongst the absolutely awful Presidents this nation has had over the last two generations, Obama is easily the worst of the bunch. Congress, of course, is right there with him. Together they are nothing less than grotesque.

I am 63 years old with a 62 year old wife who has cancer. I had a PPO plan which allowed me to choose my provider and the facilities I wanted to use. The plan cost about $1,500 per month and had a $7,000 maximum annual out of pocket. It is being cancelled. All replacement policies being offered are HMO's. My wife and I had been going to a local provider for all but her cancer doctor which was at the University Hospital, by choice. She has now been forced to join a network almost an hour from our home to stay with the University hospital. Since her current primary care physician and OB?GYN are in a different network, she must now find new ones. If I chose to remain in the existing network, I will not have access to the University Hospital, which in Wisconsin is the go to hospital of choice for cancer and heart surgery, after the first of the year. The new premiums will be almost $1,900 per month with a maximum out of pocket per year of $12,700. With her cancer and our ages, we have to assume we are going to blow through the MOOP. That is nearly $36,000 per year for health care, an increase cost of almost 45%.

I had a plan I liked. I can't keep it. I had doctors I liked. I can''t keep them. I'm paying $10,000 extra to boot. Thanks Barry

Thanks for your concerns but I wasn't looking for sympathy. I can afford what they are dishing out. It's the people my age who can't afford it that need our sympathy. My wife and I have figured out a work around. She'll go to the old doctors for checkup's and we will pay for them out of pocket. If they find something, then she can go to the new doctors/facilities. This adds to our cost and as others do so also, it will add to theirs. I'm not rich but we all know this. People with money are not affected by anything in the same manner people who don't have money are. The monied people just have more options. For those not in the "club" the screws just get tighter and tighter.

And by the way, 63 isn't old! It only seems so at 38. We really are enjoying life.

Thought exeriment: Assume all jobs in America disappear tonight. Tomorrow, no one has any jobs, and nothing is produced. Are we to believe that, even with the ACA in place, there are no entrepreneurs anywhere that could not step up and manage to make money filling the demand that would still be there? People still need to eat; they still need clothes; they still need shelter; they still need everything they needed before all jobs disappeared over night. You can't seriously believe that no one out there could make any money in this environment, even with the ACA in force.

It will take a period of adjustment. But business will adjust. The demand won't go away. And neither will the businesses who figure out how to make money in this environment of the ACA, given the demand that exists and will continue to exist. Partisans may give up - to make a point. Those who only want to make money, and don't care about partisanship, won't give up. Count on it.

He's describing the Soviet Union after The Fall. He may be a Troll, or a Prophet. When the USSR fell, everyone watched and did... nothing. The real question is, if he is a Prophet, will we in the USA be so lucky?

I know someone in human resources and job placement. ObamaCare is being used to also get rid of 40, 50 and 60 year old workers. Especially white males. Keep watching TV and Hollywood's crap because they all support Obama and the endless shows and commercials are filled with dumb white guys. I stopped watching their shit a decade ago.

If you watch TV or Hollywood's shit then you support it all. Don't complain. Looks like Cigna bought banner ads on ZH - looks like Obama has the insurance companies ramping back up. Keep being sheep TV viewers.

well dumb ass try this ---premiums up --costs up --less to spend on stuff that jobs produce so less sales so down size --duh --got it --ever heard of a snow ball rolling down hill --we used to do that as kids--gets really big and no way your going to get it to go back up hill--

people like you are so fucking stupid --if you had to make it with out gov't help you would surely die. That might be the only silver lining in this whole POS. The downfall of the collectivist gov't model and with it the demise of the FSA and the parisite gov't worker class.

Obamascare is already destroying jobs (along with numerous other Obama shit policies), and the income of the generation supposed to fund it – the clueless and largely useless “millenials,” who voted overwhelmingly (and against their own interests) for this mass takeover.

The shortfall as these entitlements come due over the next decade will be shocking.

There is a tipping point with all the redistributionist/entitlement bullshit piled on what’s left of the private sector, and that point was passed several years ago.There is no way back now.

I saw one of those millenials yesterday at the grocery store in line. Pretty Asian girl, maybe 100 lbs, with insane fake stripper t!tties, tight leather pants and spiked heels. She paid for her groceries with a snap card. As I climbed into my 12-year old Jeep I noticed her getting into a Mini Cooper Roadster.

Uh, how the fuck are businesses going to stay in business if costs exceed revenues? Obamacare is going to raise costs, and businesses running on thin margins have a choice between having negative net incomes or dropping full time workers. It's going to put jobs in the US into a death spiral.

I'm sorry but I grew up in the fifties and dads had a job at the plant and moms stayed home and most had a new electric stove, mixmaster,12in TV, two kids or more in college, a boat on a trailer in the back yard, two weeks a year at a rented cottage on a lake for vacation, pension plan, a much smaller gov't, A docter that made house calls, a congressman who would answer mail, a two bedroom house, and a not older than three year old car (most rusted out after year three) and savings in the bank that returned %5. That was midwest USA ---can't say for the rest of the world-- maybe the Marshal Plan countries were somewhat better off than the rest.

"Among franchised businesses, 27 percent report their company has replaced full-time workers with part-time workers and 31 percent have reduced worker hours. Among non-franchised businesses, 12 percent are replacing full-time workers with part-time workers or reducing hours. This is happening now, with more than a year before the mandate goes into effect; and undoubtedly, these numbers will rise as we approach next July's "look back" period for tabulating workers' hours."

Yes, people still need to eat; they still need clothes; they still need shelter. And they can't afford these things for themselves and their families on part-time hours, especially not with the added burden of skyrocketing premiums and $5000+ deductibles. Thus the ACA is, in fact, destroying jobs; the full time jobs people need to make ends meet. And to what end? Please explain to me why we have to destroy our healthcare system, our economy, and perhaps even our country, so we can provide 30 million people with health insurance---not health care (they were already getting that thanks to the COBRA rule that all hospitals receiving government funds have to treat all who arrive at their door), but health insurance. That's like blowing up the house because there's a leak in the roof. It makes no sense.

You can be the greatest entrepreneur that ever lived but if the costs of any business are so high that you can't earn a profit why would you even bother to try? The only way an entrepreneur can make a profit with all the taxes, regulations, permits, and mandates from all levels of government is to get off the grid and work in the black market. The black market economy is already estimated at 9% and will continue to grow as businesses are further strangled by the bullshit coming out of Washington and state capitals.

Sure there is lots of demand. However, when a consumer has insufficient income to satisfy that demand, how can it be met? Further, if the consumer can only afford $10 and the service or product costs $12, what business can afford to provide it?

You are right. The entrepreneurs will never give up. They will either find a way around the suffocating system or they will take their talents and leave the country.

We may all take one up the arse with ACA, but I admit that a tingle runs up my leg everytime I hear the moans of financial pain bellowed by the morons who voted for Ozero when they get the quote for their new premiums. May all you ignorant twats pay quadruple to learn your lesson in socialism and OBTW twats, the lowlifes still get theirs for free. HAHAHA...jokes on you! FREE insurance for everybody...suckers.

LOL $5,000 deductables. you can book the trip to Thailand and get just about any surgery/treatment for under $5000. in most cases you'll get higher quality care, especially now that all of the good doctors in the USA are jumping ship.

TSA at the customs exit doors: "Sir, while out of the country, did you receive or pay for medical services? I will need you to step over there for an illicit medical-services feel-up and radiation scan."

"Today federal agents and SWAT served a warrant on a home of a suspected medical-tourist. John Tate is suspected of traveling overseas to receive a hernia operation. During the raid his dogs were all shot, his 9-year old son was tazered and his wife felt-up. Additionally, $353 was arrested, as it was suspected of being illicit. In other news, Honey Boo Boo..."

You guys and your global pronouncements. ALL?? You can't possible know that this is a true statement. Shame on anybody who pays attention to the global pronouncements.

I work with a number of doctors in Southern California. A number of them earn more than a million dollars per year - because they are that good. None has any plans to jump ship. So - until these guys jump ship, your statement cannot be true.

The Investors Business Daily has done many polls of hundreds of doctors [if not thousands, I think], and very substantial numbers of them (between 30 and 70%) have said they would retire early from seeing patients or other variations of that question, depending how it was asked, due merely to the [un]Affordable Care Act [during a time when we already need more and not less doctors due to the boomers retiring!].

I humbly suggest you read a little more before [fully] forming an opinion.

But, I agree with you; it will never be ALL.

PS, my doctor has apparently retired from seeing patients [due to her unwillingness (or less likely, her inability) to comply with the new regs, if I correctly understood the somewhat-subtle hints which she seemed to have made]. But, she's still working as a "consultant"! So, there's my sample . . . size: 1 [and, personally, what other sample, regardless of size, matters (or am I just being too selfish?)].

I think it was either Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell who pointed out in an op-ed at the Investors Business Daily, if people in the US already thought that they couldn't afford the doctors, hospitals, and medical services and products available; what ever made them think that they could afford all of these same items plus a substantial new regulatory bureaucracy on top of the other costs of healthcare!!!?

Of course, I can't seem to find this excellent piece now that I am looking for it.

(Plus, would you ever put your car's oil changes on your auto insurance? Of course not! That would only make it less affordable. Why would we ever want all these other known, predictable, and steady costs of healthcare -- such as checkups or birth control -- on insurance? Go ahead, put your car's oil changes on insurance, and pay even more for less, if you are unsophisticated enough to fall for that one! That is NOT what insurance is for.)

As I read this article and the comments, I remembered that our pres and our congressional reps have exempted themselves from this Affordable Care Act atrocity... Someone tell me again why the gov schills will be motivated to change this very quickly... I mean besides the elections, which, by the way, don't seem to change anything, because we have a majority of the voters that are blind to truth and have no memory of how their reps vote...

If I wasn't over 40, I would be so discouraged... Now I'm kinda numb...